Perl has been my startups' secret weapon, and I'd rather the competition didn't know about it.
Perl let us deal with large volumes of data, at high throughput (there are several ISPs, Universities, and fortune 500 which use our product to protect their mail infrastructure from DDoS and Spam). At a former company it let us collect, parse, store, audit, and make predictions against millions of web hits per day, in close to real time, with cheap infrastructure. Perl has been solidly stable - it just runs - keeping our ecommerce infrastructure making money.
It has had few security issues over the years. It has had few backwards incompatibilities between versions over the years. As a component of our products, it's given me relatively little pain in performance, reliability and security.
Development wise, I can't count the amount of time we've saved over the years thanks to not having to reimplement something because it's on CPAN, with a sensible license, with doumentation, tests, and in an easy to find and search location. As for code quality, Perl has great support for testing, support for automating code review (Perl::Critic), and a community of developers that are constantly making things better - but without breaking things that worked in the past (Moose has done amazing things for refactoring ugly OOP code, and you can use it with any of the other older OOP stuff).
I use it because it works well, seldom breaks, and causes me less hassle than anything else I've tried (C, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby). I've spent serious time with this language; I've maintained ugly old code from 10 years ago, and giant million++ line projects written in it. It has warts, sure, but what doesn't? I don't care; it's reliable. Big jobs, little jobs - it gets the job done. And that, to me, is more important than high minded ideals about aesthetics and purity.
Strangely, the investment bank I used to work at relied heavily on Perl, without most people even realising it. A huge volume of live rates information formed the basis for a large number of Seriously Enterprise Applications, all with architecture groups and best practice gurus and all that stuff. What was ironic was how the rates got into the bank: six instances of a single Perl script that almost noone knew about, connected to the Reuters Market Data System. And the reason that it was so poorly known was simple: it was cronned to start and stop at particular times during the day, and in the four years that I was there, it went down once, when the box it was on suffered a hardware failure.
Funnily enough, a few more people knew about it after that, whereupon I got funding and contingency hardware thrown at me until I could confidently tell the powers that be that a box failure would be followed up by immediate failover and a whole bunch of alerts being generated.
Overall, I think that's where Perl does a really good job: in holding stuff together. While the Rubyists and Pythonistas are arguing over who's got the better language, Perl hackers are just getting stuff done.
Perl has been my startups' secret weapon, and I'd rather the competition didn't know about it. Perl let us deal with large volumes of data, at high throughput (there are several ISPs, Universities, and fortune 500 which use our product to protect their mail infrastructure from DDoS and Spam). At a former company it let us collect, parse, store, audit, and make predictions against millions of web hits per day, in close to real time, with cheap infrastructure. Perl has been solidly stable - it just runs - keeping our ecommerce infrastructure making money.
It has had few security issues over the years. It has had few backwards incompatibilities between versions over the years. As a component of our products, it's given me relatively little pain in performance, reliability and security. Development wise, I can't count the amount of time we've saved over the years thanks to not having to reimplement something because it's on CPAN, with a sensible license, with doumentation, tests, and in an easy to find and search location. As for code quality, Perl has great support for testing, support for automating code review (Perl::Critic), and a community of developers that are constantly making things better - but without breaking things that worked in the past (Moose has done amazing things for refactoring ugly OOP code, and you can use it with any of the other older OOP stuff).
I use it because it works well, seldom breaks, and causes me less hassle than anything else I've tried (C, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby). I've spent serious time with this language; I've maintained ugly old code from 10 years ago, and giant million++ line projects written in it. It has warts, sure, but what doesn't? I don't care; it's reliable. Big jobs, little jobs - it gets the job done. And that, to me, is more important than high minded ideals about aesthetics and purity.